GeologyRocks

A new, massive duck-billed dinosaur species has been discovered in Utah. Gryposaurus monumentensis (Gryposaurus “hook-beaked lizard”, monumentensis from Grand Staircase- Escalante National Monument where the fossils were found) from the Late Cretaceous had over 800 teeth.

More details at Utah Museum of Natural History

Geology gives a helping hand to archaeology again.

http://www.nature.com/news/2007/070514/full/070514-2.html

"Historians need not be quite so impressed by Alexander the Great's defeat of the island of Tyre in 332BC. Geological studies of the region show that Alexander's army had help reaching the island, in the form of a natural land-bridge lying just a metre or two below the water's surface."

2 months already since the last newsletter!? Time flies when you're busy. Welcome to the second GeologyRocks newsletter. This newsletter contains an update of new material on the site since last time and details on how to keep up-to-date with new content on the site. We close with some forthcoming news about the site, but we'll leave that until later.

An attempt to describe 1.8 million species launched yesterday which will provide descriptions, images, videos and sounds of all the species online. Unlike wikispecies, this will be compiled by experts and, hopefully, will be of higher quality and consistancy. Rod Page, a taxonimist from the University of Glasgow, has already tried something like this called iSpecies (more detail on Rod's blog).

By way of space.com, researchers at University of Kansas suggest that the 64 million year cycle in biodiversity, including the Ordovician and Permian extinctions, is linked to the solar system's cyclic position with respect to the galactic plane.

Only 10 million years to the next one!

A story 2 years ago reported that a fossil T-Rex femur had been found with preserved soft tissue. Those tissues have now been analysed and protein extracted. Lo-and-behold, the protein is similar to that of chickens! This is further confirmation that birds are closely related to some dinosaur species.

"It has always been assumed that preservation of [dinosaur bones] does not extend to the cellular and molecular level," said co-author Mary Schweitzer, from North Carolina State University in Raleigh, US.

These are big crystals!

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/6518161.stm

In order to grow to this size, they must have been kept in a very narrow, stable temperature range.

The crystals are described fully in a Geology article (subscription required):
http://www.gsajournals.org/perlserv/?request=index-html&issn=0091-7613

The Silverpit crater in the North Sea has received a fair bit of media attention. Here's some more.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/6503543.stm.

The K/T extinction of the dinosaurs apparently did not clear the way for the mammals to evolve - the rise of the mammals occurs 10 to 15 million years afterwards. The authors argue that either the evolution triggers have a 'slow fuse' or the demise of the dinosaurs is not as important as previously thought.

From: New York Times
and BBC News
Original: Nature Subscription required

Live Science (Original: Proceedings of the Royal Society B) reports on the discovery of a nest burrow of Oryctodromeus cubicularis, or “digging runner of the lair". The burrowing habit would allow these animals to inhabit regions of more extreme hot or cold than other dinosaurs.

There's more from the BBC: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/6472579.stm